of membership participation: for example, "marginal"
members might be motivated from a different set of
incentives than "militants." In conceptualizing this
variable, we are interested only in the type of incentive
that most commonly underlies the behavior of party
"militants," who are defined in the preceding variable,
11.02, as those who attend almost every party meeting and
constitute a ready source of manpower for performing party
activities. For this variable, the concept of party militant
applies to parties which have no formal membership as well
as those which do.

The concept of material incentives employed in this
variable includes instances of government jobs awarded to
party members or their relatives or friends in return for
services to the party ("patronage" in the classic sense),
preferential enactment of laws for monetary gain, and even
money payments from the party or government treasury.

Operational Definition. A party is scored
according to the extent that party militants seem motivated
by material incentives, using the highest applicable
code.

0

Few
militants, if any, seem motivated by material
incentives.

1

About
one-third of the militants seem motivated by
material incentives.

2

About half
of the militants seem motivated by material
incentives.

3

About
two-thirds of the mililtants seem motivated by
material incentives.

4

All or
almost all of the militants seem motivated by
material incentives.

Coding Results. Needless to say, coding parties
across the world on the extent of their reliance on
"material incentives" in motivating party militants was
hazardous at best. The means for AC 1103 in Tables 12.3a and
12.3b are the lowest reported thus far for any variable,
admitting that inferential leaps were taken from scanty
items of information. Obviously, the type of data required
to pin down the motivational bases of party militants rarely
existed in the literature. This information needs to be
collected through interviews or questionnaires, and
systematic research with such instruments is seldom
encountered in the literature of party politics in the
1950s, despite its increasing use today. Given the option of
abandoning the variable with dignity or trying to save it at
the risk of embarrassment, we chose the riskier course.
While we seldom had adequate empirical data to back our
estimates of the extent of material incentives as a
wellspring of militant behavior, we persisted in forcing
judgments on more than 70 percent of the parties. In some
cases, we were confident of the judgments even in the
absence of good data. This occurred, for example, when we
coded the militants of outlawed parties, hounded by
government police and troops, as not being motivated by
material incentives. But apart from such extremes, our
judgments usually constitute only best guesses of the
situation, as our AC codes readily admit. The significant
correlation of .25 between BV 1103 and AC 1103, moreover,
signals our higher confidence in scoring parties for the
presence of material incentives rather than their
absence.

Temporarily setting aside the issue of data quality for
BV 1103, we can consider the results of our coding.
According to our scoring, more than half the parties offer
their militants little in the way of material incentives to
encourage their activity on behalf of the party. At the
other extreme, less than one party in ten wins performance
solely through promises of personal gain, although another
10 percent or more elicit action from a majority of
militants by dangling concrete benefits before them.